2021 December Update - Obzervr Capture v1.42.11 and Obzervr Manager v41.34

With the Capture v1.42.11 release, a minor release, we are introducing some smaller new features and fixes to Capture. These go hand in hand with a number of changes in Manager and Designer, currently up to v41.34.

Capture v1.42.11 is available in stores. Manager/Designer/Console v41.34 is currently in production.

In these Release Notes, we will walk you through the following new features and improvements:

1. Location Field Hierarchy
2. Resolution of issues 
3. Foundational work for Work Navigation in Capture
4. Known Issues

Location Field Hierarchy (Parent Assignment Point)

In the September release notes, we introduced the Location field type. The location field allows you to capture plant items/functional locations you have configured for your tenant against a Work Order. In this release, we have refined the way that functional locations are presented in this field in Capture. The presentation in the list will show their identifier and name and will present them in the functional location hierarchy that is configured. This hierarchy is created using the parent/child relationship in the configuration of your functional locations (through the use of the "Parent Assignment Point"), note that this is a new configuration option.

Whilst the Location Field Type is now on by default in Designer and Capture, visualisation of the functional locations via a hierarchical view requires a feature flag to be enabled. We have made some performance optimisations and introduced filtering the locations via functional location type. 

Refer to this article for more information on how to set up and use this field type.

Resolution of issues

A number of issues that our users have experienced over the last few weeks have been resolved in this release:

• Resolves an issue where saving progress on a Group (feature flag Instance Field History) takes a long time. Based on customer feedback, we have made some tweaks to how this feature works so that when you click the back button to exit a page, you do not have to wait for the data captured to save. This will make it much faster to traverse the app and its pages when this feature is turned on. 
• Inserts updates to history upon opening history in Capture. Previously, unless you exited the page or clicked to explicitly 'save' the data captured on the page, the field history would not be shown or recorded in the History page. This change is to allow you to directly access the page without performing another click or action. 
• Improves stability where new field types are introduced to Capture. Based on learnings from implementing the Location field type earlier this year, some improvements were made to address the root cause and ensure that introducing new fields does not impact the stability or experience of the app.
• Resolves an issue where an exception, created by conditional logic, could not be resolved. This change was made to address the fact that it was not possible to resolve exceptions created by our conditional logic feature in the app. 
• Resolves an issue where annotations to Photos, saved as field uploads, would not sync until a field measure value was recorded. To minimise clicks, we have resolved this issue so annotations on Photos will save regardless of whether a field measure was recorded afterwards. 
• Resolves a crash when swapping between Landscape & Portrait mode for Photos (introduced in v1.42.10). A crash noticed on release of v1.42.10 on mainly iOS devices has been resolved where, if a photo was taken in landscape mode, the controller used to take photos would try to save it in potrait mode. 
• Resolves an issue where the Group Summary displays time in military time (i.e. 00:00 am), which is not consistent with the normal time (i.e. 12:00 am) shown throughout the rest of Capture. 
• Resolves an issue where recording a 'Other' On Hold Reason on Capture did not save as expected. It was noticed that sometimes the Other On Hold Reason was either not displaying as expected in Manager, but also in Analytics, so we have investigated and resolved the issue so that when the On Hold Reason is Other and a reason is defined, these flow through and show where expected. 
• Resolves an issue where a time travel issue in the Capture app would prevent the user from syncing successfully. In some situations, events recorded in the app are logged incorrectly and then cause sync issues. We have resolved this.
• Resolves an issue where the app would crash when opening a Field Measurements group for an Assignment Type template. We have resolved an issue where customers which use our legacy configuration tools (i.e. Assignment Types) would crash the app. 

Foundational work for Simple Work Navigation

One of the exciting features currently in development is Simple Work Navigation on Obzervr Capture. This will introduce a new, simple and streamlined way of navigating work on Obzervr Capture. It will include: 

• A table of contents to quickly understand the contents and navigate around the assignment
• Create a new reoccurrence directly for the table of contents
• Easily filter your work
• Navigate back and forth between groups with quick navigation buttons at the bottom of the group page

We are progressively building this new and exciting feature and have released some of the foundational components. You won't notice a change in v1.42.11 but it's there in the background :) We have implemented a feature flag so that current users will not be impacted until the feature is good to go. 

Feel free to follow its progress and check out other features that are on our roadmap at roadmap.obzervr.com.

Known Issues

There are known issues in the Obzervr products that we still working on and are to be resolved in future releases. Here are some of the issues that may impact the day to day use of the Obzervr system (Manager, Designer, Capture):

• Performance issues with certain "field spec" devices
  Some Intrinsically Safe (IS) devices or rugged field devices like the ECOM and iSafe mobile devices have been seeing degraded performance after being used for more than one hour. Whilst we haven't had any reports of this happening in the last few weeks, this performance problem can still occur in certain scenarios.
  Workaround: when running into degraded performance on the device, it's worth closing the app completely (not put it to background or resetting the app) and reopening the app. This "resets" the memory used by the app and you should see the app return to normal usage.
• Remaining issues Child Groups
  Some issues remain in using child groups in certain scenarios. You may want to refrain from using these configuration options until resolved. If unsure please contact us via support@obzervr.com.
  • Using "Is Time-Based" for Child groups in conjunction with Conditional Logic
  • Using "Priority" for Child groups in conjunction with Conditional Logic
  • Using multiple (more than 1) levels of child groups - may not count the groups correctly.
• Tenant switch in offline mode freezes screen if switching to a tenant not yet synced
  As per section 2, point 1, you can now switch tenants when you're offline, however, this only works when you've already synced this tenant at least once on your device. If you haven't synced that tenant before, Capture will show an error message, saying you should sync this tenant when you're back in range of a network. This is expected behaviour; Capture cannot present anything if the first-time sync for this tenant hasn't occurred yet. The issue presents itself after you've clicked OK on this message: the switch tenant screen has become unresponsive; you cannot switch to another tenant.
  Workaround: click on the back button (top left) and try switching tenants again.
• Unable to access Work Order list on Manager using Safari browser on iOS devices
  We are having an issue where using the Safari browser on iOS devices (e.g. iPad) will not allow users to access ti the Work Order list, and will be re-directed back to the Dashboard instead.
  Workaround: Use Chrome on the iOS devices to access the Manager